Rural fire departments struggle as shale drilling boosts economies

Unconventional shale drilling, or fracking, has buoyed the economies and filled the coffers of eastern Ohio counties over the last couple of years. It also has brought high levels of vehicle traffic and new industrial plants to rural communities that depend almost entirely on volunteer fire departments with limited budgets and aging equipment.

Beth Whitmer had just come home from work when the scream of sirens and the rumble of 16 firetrucks broke the quiet evening at her home on Brussel Road NE.

In a field a half-mile away, flames were consuming a tanker truck at Rex Energy's Brace West well pad. A hill obscured Whitmer's view, but she knew something was burning.

"You could just see the orange glow above the trees," she said.

When firefighters came to Whitmer's home and said she could evacuate, she put three of her horses in a trailer, while her daughter saddled a fourth, and they sought shelter at a friend's house three miles down the road.

"We left right there. I wasn't taking any chances," said Whitmer, who is quick to say she sees drilling as an otherwise positive development.

After letting the fire burn down for 14 hours, firefighters extinguished the flames. The two wells never caught fire.

"Nobody got hurt, that's the main thing," Whitmer said.

The fire was the first in Carroll County involving a Utica Shale well site, and with at least 240 Utica wells drilled in the county and more on the way, it probably won't be the last.

PROMISES/BURDENS

Unconventional shale drilling, or fracking, has buoyed the economies and filled the coffers of eastern Ohio counties over the last couple of years. It also has brought high levels of vehicle traffic and new industrial plants to rural communities that depend almost entirely on volunteer fire departments with limited budgets and aging equipment.

The natural gas and oil industry has provided training to emergency services, but officials in the two most active Utica Shale counties say they need more equipment and money to keep pace with the boom.

"I got to stress it, Harrison and Carroll county got zero full-time fire departments," said Tom Cottis, Carroll's emergency management director. "Columbiana County's got East Liverpool and Salem. You go over to Jefferson County, you've got Steubenville. We're in the heart of it with three full-time, paid departments."

DRILLING CAPITAL

No county in Ohio has more Utica wells than Carroll, and Cottis can pinpoint the day drilling first affected local emergency services.

"We had our first call May 16, 2011," he said. "We had a frack truck roll over in the county and it's been snowballing ever since."

Just before an interview in late October for this story, Cottis responded to a tanker carrying hydrochloric acid that went off the road. Nothing spilled, but the incident underscored the challenges that come from the stream of Utica traffic converging on the county.

"I swear this is the truck capital of the world right now with all the water trucks and the sand trucks and the drilling trucks and the pickups that all these companies use to work on gas and oil exploration," Carroll County Sheriff Dale Williams said.

Page 2 of 5 - More vehicles and more people mean more accidents and more incident reports.

In 2011, when Utica drilling first started, the county had 444 traffic crashes and the sheriff's office handled 1,435 incident reports. Those numbers climbed to 535 traffic crashes and 1,540 incident reports in 2012.

This year, the statistics stand at 475 and 1,310 through October, and Williams said he expects the totals to surpass last year's.

Not only are more vehicles on the road, they are now larger, meaning more severe accidents, and more trucks are carrying hazardous loads.

The Carroll County Emergency Management Agency does annual traffic surveys of the hazardous materials coming through the county. In 2004, there were six trucks on one stretch of road during an 8-hour shift, Cottis said.

"We did that same section of road this past year and in four hours we were up to 80 trucks," he said.

The county has seen a couple of "nuisance spills," such as drilling mud that leaked along a dozen miles of state route from Carrollton to Malvern, and an acid spill in Carrollton, he said.

But the potential exists for greater hazards. If a tanker carrying volatile condensate crashed on the village square?

"It could wreak havoc," Cottis said.

KEEPING PACE

To keep up with the extra traffic, Williams said he wants to add at least two road-patrol deputies and another in the jail, but that depends on the commissioners. The sheriff's budget already has increased by almost $200,000 since 2011.

Other than two vehicles donated by Chesapeake Energy, the sheriff said his office hasn't received any help from drilling companies.

County sales taxes collections for the first eight months of this year were $2.3 million, up $556,000 over the same period last year, but the money hasn't trickled down to the county's 14 fire departments, which rely on tax levies and fundraisers.

The Carrollton Fire Department covers the village and five townships, including the Brace West site. It has a yearly budget of $126,000 and when any of its 35 firefighters go to a call, they are paid for their time."It's been a financial burden on the fire department because at this point, this time, we have no more money coming in but we're having more auto accidents and more calls, which makes payroll bigger ... fuel bills higher," Chief Tom Mesler said.

Fighting gas and oil fires also takes more water, more hoses, more firefighters and Class B foam, which costs between $85 and $116 per five-gallon bucket.

"We used to keep three or four buckets of Class B foam," Mesler said. "Now we have 40."

The department has sent 19 firefighters to training provided by the Ohio Oil and Gas Energy Education Program, an industry-funded group. It also had three firefighters attend training sponsored by processing-plant operator M3 Midstream. Another company gave the department a $2,500 grant.

Page 3 of 5 - Mesler said his department is keeping pace with training, but none of the local departments are getting a financial upgrade.

"We're just trying to keep our head above water and do the best we can," he said.

THE HUB

On a sunny day, the gleaming silver spires of M3 Midstream's new Utica East Ohio Buckeye plant can be seen clearly from the Scio Volunteer Fire Department.

Called the Harrison Hub, the plant is a 640-acre sprawl of tanks, tubes, spheres and pipelines designed to separate the gasses and liquids that flow from Utica wells into propane, butane, ethane and natural gasoline.

When fully operational, the plant will be able to process 135,000 barrels of natural gas liquids a day and load 200 railcars a day, plus tanker trucks. It also will have storage space for millions of gallons of natural gasoline, butane and propane, said Eric Mize, M3 Midstream's emergency and public awareness liaison.

Fourteen months ago it was farm land next to a village of fewer than 800 residents.

"This is all new for us," said Roger Bethel, chief of Scio's 25 firefighters.

Harrison County is the definition of rural: Fewer than 16,000 people spread across 400 square miles and 10 villages, served by 12 volunteer fire departments.

Harrison is the second busiest Utica Shale county with 94 wells drilled or drilling, and has become a center for processing facilities. M3 Midstream is in Scio, MarkWest has a plant near Cadiz and is building another in Hopedale, and Blue Racer is considering a processing facility near the Tuscarawas County line.

"It's really taking off here and Harrison County's going to be a hub for the natural gas industry for a long time to come," Sheriff Ronald J. Myers said.

"We have emergency plans from the facilities and what they intend to do, but some of them are very close to population centers and that concerns me because we've got a very limited time if we would have to evacuate any village," Bower said.

The county emergency management agency conducted an evacuation drill of homes nearest the Scio plant in April. It also has simulated a tanker crash.

In the event of a serious emergency at a well site or a processing plant, local volunteer firefighters will probably direct traffic and evacuate residents, rather than respond directly to the emergency, Bower said.

MarkWest, for example, has provided a 16-hour course for 60 firefighters from Harrison, Belmont and Jefferson counties on how to respond to fires at gas plants and pipelines.

"If there is, God forbid, a fire, we don't put that out," said Edward Ross, safety manager for MarkWest Utica operations. "We shut valves off and the fire is extinguished by extinguishing the fuel source."

Page 4 of 5 - TRAINING IN SCIO

For now, Scio firefighters have an emergency role outside the Harrison Hub plant, but that could change as the department does more training with M3 Midstream personnel, Mize said.

Scio firefighters are among 17 local first responders who have received 40 hours of training at the Ohio Fire Academy near Columbus sponsored by M3 Midstream. Last weekend, the department and plant employees had a two-day training session on fighting railcar fires. That training was paid for by an outside grant.

Mize said the skills local firefighters are learning apply to emergencies inside and outside the plant.

"It's in their backyard," he said. "It wouldn't be right to do this kind of training and not include them."

The plant itself has automatic safety sensors and a 2 million gallon fire-suppression system that can pump 6,000 gallons of water a minute, as well as a fire truck and a supply of foam that could be used to help neighboring communities, Mize said.

M3 Midstream also pays for the sheriff's office to provide five hours of law enforcement coverage, Monday through Saturday, in the village, and has been discussing the purchase of a reverse 911 system for the county.

Bethel has visited residents who live closest to the plant, taking addresses and phone numbers and noting disabled persons and others who would need additional help during an evacuation.

"We just want people to know there is the chance of a hazard out there and we're going to work our best with Midstream to get everything taken care of," he said. "We're going to continue training with them, and we're going to look out for the village. And we're always in need of volunteers."

The department also needs new equipment. Its two engines, from 1991 and 1989, are past the usual 20-year life span. Bethel said he wants to replace one of them in the next year, but an engine costs $300,000 and up.

For a department that gets 60 percent of its $80,000 annual budget from fundraisers, such as monthly roast beef dinners and a four-day street fair in August, that will mean grant dollars.

FINDING MONEY

At the county level, Harrison, Jefferson, Carroll and Columbiana are applying for $3.54 million in state homeland security money to put two emergency sirens in every township, which could be used in a variety of situations.

"Obviously with the pipelines coming in, it becomes regional because everything is tied together," said Luke Newbold, emergency management director in Columbiana County, which is spearheading the grant application.

But regionalization and grants will only go so far. Officials in Carroll and Harrison counties say a portion of the severance tax on natural gas and oil production needs to return to the most affected counties.

The industry opposes any increase in the severance tax, saying it would stall development.

Page 5 of 5 - "Emergency medical services are stressed, fire services are stressed," said Harrison County Commissioner Don Bethel, a Republican who supports sending at least 1 percent of the severence tax collected by the state to the counties bearing the brunt of oil and gas exploration.

Bower and Cottis said some of the revenue needs to be allotted for emergency services.

"A percent of that money has to come back to the first responders," Cottis said. "We're the boots on the ground whenever something happens."

Reach Shane at 330-580-8338 or shane.hoover@cantonrep.com.

On Twitter: @shooverREP

M3 Midstream operates natural gas processing plants in Kensington and Scio as part of the Utica East Ohio Buckeye system. A third plant is being built near Leesville.